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Guide to Successful Printing to PDF

Modified on: Tue, 6 Nov, 2018 at 11:31 AM

With the release of R26 (21423), printing to PDF for both documents and reports is done using Windows 10 to print documents straight to PDF.*

Things to Consider

There are a number of elements that come into play when printing documents to PDF from software applications. Some of these can be, e.g., operating system version, Windows display scaling, screen resolution, and paper size. If you are having difficulties obtaining an acceptable PDF output from SystemWeaver, we recommend you review the following.

Display Scaling

If you change your Windows Display Scaling during a Windows session,

...be sure to log out of your Windows session and back in as advised by Windows before opening the swExplorer client again to ensure a complete and proper reset of the scaling in the application. Otherwise, this may affect your printing to PDF.

The print preview example below illustrates what a print preview can look like if a user does not log out of their Windows account after changing the display scaling. The user is unable to determine if the printed output will be acceptable.

If reset correctly and with paper size consistently defined, users who have a display setting of 125% and even 150% should be able to successfully print to PDF.

Scaling of Report-Generated Tables

Currently (R27), we recommend that Architects set table widths to ”auto” for generated tables in Report XML Definitions if they want them to ”grow” to the full width of the page for print-outs. If set to ”auto”, the tables will adjust for users with different display scaling settings. If they are not set to ”auto”, they will not scale to fit 125% and 150% display scaling, i.e., they will appear and print more narrow for those users.

There are plans to auto-scale report-generated tables without having to set columns to "auto" [12569, 12570].

Paper Size

Template Headers Designed for Specific Paper Size

If Architects define document template headers for the A4 paper size in the database, then users must print to A4 paper size when printing to PDF. Printing to another paper size will result in output that may not be satisfactory. This is especially true if the optional <PrintPageBoundary/> tag is used since this tag puts a border around the entire page and it will not align properly with document header borders if they are included in the header templates.

Example

A4 Paper Size

100% display scaling: 688px header table width

This automatically scales as follows when display scaling is properly reset:

125% display scaling: 860px

150% Ddisplay scaling: 1032px

A4 vs. Letter Paper Size Selection for a Document Template Designed for A4:

Microsoft Print to PDF Default Setting for Paper Size

Set your default paper size for Microsoft Print to PDF to the paper size used for your documents and reports to help avoid printing issues.

Note: The paper size selection for Microsoft Print to PDF affects all applications in Windows.

If you use different paper sizes in other applications throughout the day, you may need to reset your paper size in SystemWeaver to the paper size used for a document or report prior to printing.**

Typically, all report and document templates will be configured for either A4 or Letter size paper. You can check the currently set Paper Size in the header's description Editor Page Setup menu or in the Print tool when you are ready to print.